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No One Left to Come Looking for You: A Novel - Hardcover

Lipsyte, Sam

 
9781501146121: No One Left to Come Looking for You: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1501146122 ISBN 13: 9781501146121
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A darkly comic mystery by the author of Hark and The Ask set in the vibrant music scene of early 1990s New York City.

Manhattan’s East Village, 1993. Dive bars, DIY music venues, shady weirdos, and hard drugs are plentiful. Crime is high but rent is low, luring hopeful, creative kids from sleepy suburbs around the country.

One of these is Jack S., a young New Jersey rock musician. Just a few days before his band’s biggest gig, their lead singer goes missing with Jack’s prized bass, presumably to hock it to feed his junk habit. Jack’s search for his buddy uncovers a sinister entanglement of crimes tied to local real estate barons looking to remake New York City—and who might also be connected to the recent death of Jack’s punk rock mentor. Along the way, Jack encounters a cast of colorful characters, including a bewitching, quick-witted scenester who favors dressing in a nurse’s outfit, a monstrous hired killer with a devotion to both figure skating and edged weapons, a deranged if prophetic postwar novelist, and a tough-talking cop who fancies himself a retro-cool icon of the homicide squad but is harboring a surprising secret.

No One Left to Come Looking for You is a page-turning suspense novel that also serves as a love letter to a bygone era of New York City where young artists could still afford to chase their dreams.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collections Venus Drive and The Fun Parts and four novels: Hark, The Ask (a New York Times Notable Book), The Subject Steve, and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the Believer Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories, among other places. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, he lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One ONE
The day after I decide I’m Jack Shit, the Banished Earl steals my Fender Jazz Bass.

Dyl Becker at King Snake Guitars wakes me with a phone call before I even know it’s gone.

“Jonathan,” he says.

“I’m Jack now.”

I stir sugar into a cold mug of yesterday’s Bustelo, stare out my smeared kitchen window at the brick facade across the air shaft.

“Jonathan,” Dyl says. “The Earl was just in here with your bass. I could tell it was yours from that little Annihilation of the Soft Left sticker on the headstock. Hey, I thought you weren’t friends with those guys anymore.”

“I’m not,” I say, “but it’s a pain to scrape that thing off. Did you buy the bass from him?”

“He didn’t have the papers. Even if I hadn’t known it was yours, I wouldn’t have bought it. You’ve got to have the papers.”

“He left with it?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck.”

“What’s wrong?”

“He’ll just trade it for a measly bag of dope.”

“Hey, it might not be measly. But yeah, that sucks.”

While I hold the phone to my ear, I scan the Rock Rook for any other missing objects. Seems like all the other stuff—not much, admittedly, besides some milk crates full of records and books, ashtrays full of the Earl’s ash, empty forty bottles, a few chipped dishes—is still here. I’ve shared this one bedroom on Avenue B with the Banished Earl for about nine months, though it wasn’t always a one bedroom. It used to be a studio. We threw up a high wedge of plywood to make a little sarcophagus for the Earl. I sleep on a foam mat near the door.

“Hey, Jonathan?”

“I told you, I’m Jack now.”

“As in Jack Shit?”

“Exactly,” I say.

“What made you change it?”

“I just like how it sounds.”

“Cool.”

“Okay. Later, Dyl.”

“Wait.”

“What.”

“I heard you guys are looking for a new drummer.”

“Preferably a girl drummer,” I say.

“I can be a girl drummer.”

“No, Dyl. You don’t hit hard enough.”

“I hit hard.”

“Not in time.”

“I’m better, Jona— I mean, Jack. I’ve been practicing all month.”

“No.”

It’s touching how much Dyl dreams of joining the band, but some were meant to lead, others to follow, and still others to hang around, devoted mascots.

“Well, how about a second guitar player?” Dyl says. “Think about it. A fucking sonic curtain, right? And, no offense, but I’ve got better chops than you or Cutwolf.”

“That’s true,” I say. “But the very fact you said chops disqualifies you.”

“What does that mean?”

“Think about it. No offense. I’ve got to find the Earl.”

In our world, you may not say chops or axe or jam. You may say gwee-tar, fish, tubs, bitch out, beat bag, bag fever.

Every subgroup has its own linguistic code.

We’re not even a subgroup. We’re just the Shits, a fast-disintegrating band. We used to have solidarity. We used to have esprit de corps. We used to have, according to Sour Mash magazine, a “scabrous, intermittently witty, post-skronk propulsion not unlike early Anal Gnosis.”

But then bag fever set in.

The Banished Earl is the worst. The abscess in his arm is a black, ragged wormhole. You could swan dive into it, time travel, get shot out into the future, the year 2000 perhaps, or a few hundred years in the past. Picture old France. Picture beauty-marked men who prowl and preen, in tights, in wigs. Their skinny swords serrate the air. It’s sort of like some of the bars we play. It’s sort of like us some nights. The Shits do like to dress up. The Shits are a writhing, shimmering society of the spectacle. The Shits are fierce and noisy and wounded and sad.

The Shits fear not art.

But you may not say art.

But you may certainly say that the new year, at least so far, slurps the sandpapery, drippy johnson of a clapped-out rhino. I’m happy to say it along with you, or even compose a melody, if you think there’s a song there, though such retrograde, faux-transgressive vulgarity is not quite our style, even if we are called the Shits. Point is, it’s only January and I’m almost broke. My girlfriend, Vesna, has ditched me for good and, perhaps most catastrophically, my J-Bass is gone. Point is, I must locate the Banished Earl before he surrenders my fish for a measly, probably half-beat bag of Tango & Cash, which, if word in the bars can be trusted, is the most undiluted dope east of Ludlow Street. Point is, I need my bass and we need the Earl. If the Shits are not utterly atomized, we have a show at Artaud’s Garage a week from this Saturday.

We are guaranteed 13 percent of the door. If twenty-five people come at five bucks a pop that’s… well, you do the theorem.

I don my thermals and various sweaters and shirts—my mother taught me the laws of layering early in life—and step out into the frozen bleakscape. My city is a tundra. The wind whips in off the river like the river is one of those cool dominatrix chicks just doing it to finance her comp lit degree and the wind is, for instance, a whip. Cutwolf’s sister Drusilla was a domme for a time, until she dropped out of the pain game to become a serious cake maker. That’s not even a euphemism. She’s on the American Fondant Team, flies to Antwerp for major competitions.

I’ve never been to Europe. I’ve never been out of the country, unless you count Canada, which I don’t. But a dude in Barcelona has been playing our second seven-inch, “Shits for Real,” on his indie radio show. He sent us a very complimentary postcard. That could lead to something. A few dates in the Gothic Quarter? A European tour? A person can dream. But not without his instrument. No bass, no band. I hold down the bottom.

I also write the songs. I am not exactly music, but I do write the songs. Or at least the tunes to a lot of them, along with Cutwolf and Hera.

The Banished Earl is our front man, our lyricist and lead screamer. His brief includes but is not restricted to howls, whimpers, banshee shrieks, declamations, provocations, semi-ironic rooster struts, blind dives into the mosh pit, simulated or else revocable genital self-mutilation, and, of course, spectacle. Spectacle above all else.

Though now that the Banished Earl is the Vanished Earl, all bets are off until I find him.

But first, sustenance. The pizza joint on Avenue A boasts a permanent special: two slices and a soda for a dollar fifty. Most days, that’s a decent portion of my life savings.

Now I stand at one of the tall, circular Formica tables, shake out some oregano on my oven-blistered slabs. New York pizza is the best pizza, so let’s not have that conversation, but I’m not one of those process fascists when it comes to your eating technique. Fold the fucker, eat it flat, cut it into baby bites with a plastic knife, run it through a...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1501146122
ISBN 13 
9781501146121
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
224
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